DOI 10.1515/tlr-2013-0006 The Linguistic Review 2013; 30(2): 161 – 184 João Costa and Sandra Pereira a gente: pronominal status and agreement revisited Abstract: The status of the expression a gente (lit. the people) in European Portu- guese is the topic of this paper. We revisit its classical analysis, treating it as a pronoun, and the explanation for the patterns of agreement it may trigger on the inflected verb. In particular, the paper addresses Taylor’s (2009) argument against the pronominal status of a gente, and argues that it can be analyzed as a regular DP. We compare a gente with other pronouns, showing that there are more robust regularities than those described in Taylor’s arguments, but adopt part of his analysis to accommodate the variable status of agreement patterns under a phase-based approach. Keywords: agreement, pronouns, dialectal variation João Costa: CLUNL/FCSH/Universidade Nova de Lisboa. E-mail: jcosta@fcsh.unl.pt Sandra Pereira: CLUL/Universidade de Lisboa 1 Introduction This paper revisits the distribution of the expression a gente (lit. the people), which is used in Portuguese in the same context as the first person plural pronoun nós “we”. Most authors agree on the description that this expression has grammaticalized onto a pronoun (e.g. Nascimento 1989, Menuzzi 2000, Lopes 1999, Pereira 2003, Costa et al. 2001). What is special about this form is that it has mixed features: on the one hand, it refers to a plural entity in the discourse (like first person plural pronouns), on the other hand, it has third person singular grammatical features. As argued in Menuzzi (2000), the two sets of features are grammatically active, which can be seen in binding environments. When a gente is a local antecedent for a dependent anaphoric expression, a 3 rd person singular form has to be used, as in (1), whereas a 1 st person plural pronoun has to be selected in non-local environments, as in (2): (1) a. A gente viu-se no espelho. The people saw-SE in the mirror Brought to you by | University of Pittsburgh Authenticated | 132.174.255.116 Download Date | 9/27/13 9:30 PM